Web
Design

Fall 2006
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chat page - after the first class

Sep 8 - Sep 22

Good Morning!
This is Jamiel from Boston. I could really get use to using Wiki. It is a cool tool. What is going on Sean? How was the commute.
I look forward to speaking with all of you soon.
Hello Everyone.
This is Selena from Keene, NH. I have been a big fan of Wikipedia for awhile now. I cringe when I see teachers and librarians wasting money by buying encyclopedias. I try to explain to them how Wikipedia works but some of them fear it because "anyone can edit it." Does anyone have any better arguments supporting the use of Wikipedia?
I admit that I still awkward with the wiki syntax. It is too simple.
No supporting arguments as of yet Selena, but I will keep you informed.. I am really liking Wikipedia. I have been on it all night and this morning. -Jamiel
"arguments supporting wikipedia ..." - see its FAQ , overview FAQ, and School and teacher FAQ. The basic idea is that only material which the entire community can agree on survives in the long run. Yes, anyone can put in bad stuff - but anyone else can revert that to a previous version (if it's graffiti) or correct it (if they know better). Most articles (in my experience) have experts who've contributed and who pay attention to what happens to the articles they've collaborated on. Moreover, each article has a "discussion" page where the interested parties talk about what the article should say.
There are certainly many Wikipedia articles of poor quality. That's true of all web pages on the 'net. Does that mean educators should not use these resources? No, it means that they need to teach their students how to evaluate the quality of their sources. All good wikipedia articles cite their sources, and students should be following those citations - as they should with any source. Moreover, they should be fixing the errors and contribute to the body of knowledge themselves - then they're really a part of the learning community, eh? Active participation is an education model to encourage, and that's what Wikipedia is about.
All that being said, I would not argue that buying print encyclopedias is a waste of money. I think the Wikipedia is extremely cool, but it's not the only game in town.
One more point to bring up : there was a study done this year by Nature comparing Brittanica with Wikipedia. The reult: "Wikipedia comes close to Brittanica in terms of the accuracy of its science articles." ( http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a.html ) - Jim, Sun at 5pm
I am going to have to look in to this article.- Jamiel, Sunday @ 6:17pm
The article is very good. It is nice to have hard evidence. Thanks, Selena
So far, so good. After reading the texts, it makes me want to revise most of my school district website pages. I would like to get away from using tables for layouts.
I finished my assignment webpage on Web 2.0 and I am happy that it has no tables. It is the kind of page that I would use for a workshop. I uploaded it to the zonorus server. This is my new correct link. http://zonorus.marlboro.edu/~sgarrison/msie2007/web_design/assignment1/web2.0.html" target="blank">http://zonorus.marlboro.edu/~sgarrison/msie2007/web_design/assignment1/web2.0.html
Selena- Sat. 9/16 @ 5:07 pm Revised 9/22 12:50 am
Hello everyone, I just added the class and am just getting up to speed. Selena, the site looks good! However, you have the last parenthesis as part of the link. Wikipedia is fantastic! It's easy to get off tangent with the abundance of information within each article (links). I'll probably be the class rookie, so I'm looking forward to learning a great deal! Nate - 9/18 2:38 pm
Hello again and welcome to the class Nate. Thanks for telling me about the link. It should work now. Selena - 9/18 8:20 pm
Good Evening Everyone, Welcome to the class Nate. I look forward to meeting you in person. Here is a little something that I have toyed with for a minute. This is very basic. Please let me know what you all think.
Monday, September 18th @ 9:34pm - Jamiel
Hi All, I've been making a simple page myself. I've always had problems with getting photos to show up in my pages.
I would appreciate some guidance, my site is at
I think Nate will have some competition from me on being the web page rookie.
9/18/2006 Wes
Hi Wes. I've just ssh'ed to zonorus to look at the files you have there, and see this:
mahoney@zonorus:/home/wvaughan/html$ pwd /home/wvaughan/html mahoney@zonorus:/home/wvaughan/html$ ls -al total 456 drwxr-xr-x 3 wvaughan student 4096 2006-09-18 21:14 . drwxr-xr-x 3 wvaughan student 4096 2006-09-18 20:56 .. -rw-r--r-- 1 wvaughan student 172777 2006-09-18 21:00 House 1.GIF -rw-r--r-- 1 wvaughan student 130904 2006-09-18 21:03 house 2.GIF -rw-r--r-- 1 wvaughan student 128545 2006-09-18 21:05 house3.GIF drwxr-xr-x 2 wvaughan student 4096 2006-09-18 21:18 Images -rw-r--r-- 1 wvaughan student 1124 2006-09-18 21:50 index.html mahoney@zonorus:/home/wvaughan/html$ ls -al Images total 184 drwxr-xr-x 2 wvaughan student 4096 2006-09-18 21:18 . drwxr-xr-x 3 wvaughan student 4096 2006-09-18 21:14 .. -rw-r--r-- 1 wvaughan student 172777 2006-09-18 21:18 House 1.GIF mahoney@zonorus:/home/wvaughan/html$
Your index.html reads in part like this:
<div> <h3 class=twix> This is the start- Demolition of the old structure.</h3> </div> <img src="images/house 1.gif" align="middle" width="1000" height="500" /><br /> </div> <h3 class=twix> Framing begins.</p> <div> <img src="images/house 2.gif" width="1000" height="500" /><br /> </div> <h3 class=twix> Finished product just need a little paint.</h3> <div> <img src="images/house3.gif" width="1000" height="500" /><br /> </div> <h3 class=twix> Looking good now that it is painted</h3> <div> <img src="images/house 1.gif" width="1000" height="500" /><br /> </div>
From this I see several problems.
  1. You're leaving spaces in your file names. This isn't handled consistently across different file systems (not to mention URL's) and is generally a Bad Idea. Uses underbars instead, e.g. house_1.gif
  2. Your folder is named Images (capital I) but in your source you references images/ (small i).
  3. Some of your pictures are in the images folder, some aren't, even though the .html source looks for them all there.
One more suggestion: several of you have now put up this first assignment as your "index.html" page at the top of your zonorus account. Another Bad Idea : you're not going to want to leave it there, and so the URL you're using will only be valid for a week or so. Instead, set up a directory structure that'll have some meaning over time, such as
/home/wvaughan/msie2007/web_design/assignment1/house.html
or some such.
Also, using index.html hides the files in that directory. Is that what you want for a demo like this? Or would it be better to let visitors see what files there are?
And since we've been posting here in a more linear conversation rather than a threaded conversation, I've started putting dashes in between 'em so I can tell what goes with what. The colon at the start of the line to make it indented thing works better for responses. Like this:
How's the soup? --Bob
It's great!! --Lisa
Not too bad.. --George
I made it myself! --Bob
I think the soup discussion should be moved to soup.. --Lisa
I tend to disagree. --George
- Jim
Since you said that we shouldn't use the index.html for our first assignment, should we just put a link for our first assignment on the index.html page?
- Sean 9/19
Hi Sean. I'm simply suggesting that you use URL's that will persist, and that you organize your work online in a reasonable way. When you say "the index.html" page what are you referening to? Your zonorus/~user/ front page? If so, the question is what you want to put there and what you want to use it for. We can talk more about this on Friday. - Jim, Thurs morning
Good Morning Mr. Fallon, How is the first assignment coming along? Get at me when you have sometime. Until then, later.
- September 20, 2006 @ 8:50am - Jamiel
What's up Jamiel. It's moving along not quite done yet but I have a start. How are you doing? Last week was nuts I had so much stuff going on it was crazy. We'll have to talk about the IPL assignment. Peace - Sean 9/20 1pm
Looking at this assignment for IPL. This is going to be interesting. We will definitely talk. This week has been crazy for me as well. We have the Fall Associates starting next week. A lot of accounts to get ready for. What did you think about my web page? Honestly? - September 20, 2006 @ 4:25pm - Jamiel
Let's talk about that Fri night. --Jim
The soup is good. Are you bringing some on Friday? --JD
'fraid not. --Jim
Hello everyone! Class is just around the corner. I'm still working on the assignment, but here's what I have so far http://zonorus.marlboro.edu/~nbatts Ok, here's my question... I have these strange symbols that appear to the left of the Marlboro Banner. When you view the source from a browser, you can see them as part of the code. However, those symbols are definetly not there in Notepad++ where I wrote it. Also, this is a work in progress, so go easy on me! -Nate 9/21 4:35PM
Hi Nate. How did you move the file from your windows machine (assuming that's what you crated it on given your mention of Notepad++) to zonorus? Perhaps it got garbled in the process? Be aware the file conventions (names, line endings, encodings, ...) vary between computers. I'm not sure what put the extra characters in there, but there they are. One fix is to edit the file right on zonorus with a command line editor like nano, vim, or emacs. - Jim on Thursday night
Hey all, I finally got my work finished. glaze0101 dot com .
See you guys tomorrow night.
JD
Hello Everyone. I revised my folder setup and renamed my index.html file to web2.0.html. I hope I set up the folders correctly. Here is the new link. http://zonorus.marlboro.edu/~sgarrison/msie2007/web_design/assignment1/web2.0.html" target="blank"> http://zonorus.marlboro.edu/~sgarrison/msie2007/web_design/assignment1/web2.0.html
I also modified my page with some minor add-ons. It is hard to know when to stop. I find that I am never really finished with my pages. There is always something that you want to "tweak."
See you all tomorrow.
Selena 9/22 12:41 am
Hi Selena. I din't mean to imply that there's only one 'right' way to set up your folders; I was just suggesting that choosing good addresses will make it easier to organize your material and for them to last a long time - which can really help when I go back at the end of the term to find these things again. Anyway, thanks. -- Jim, too late Thurs night

That is excellent JD. I will see you all later on. - September 22, 2006 @ 8:42am - Jamiel
Hey everyone this is Jess, I finished my first assignment not too long ago, but was wondering where everyone hosts their sites... Do we get space on the marlboro server? And if so, how would I go about accessing that?
Thanks! See you all this evening.
Hi Jess. There are several marlboro.edu options that we can talk about tonight.
Prob'ly simplest is to use the account you already have on akbar. --Jim
Good Morning All, just passing through and wanted to say hi, hello. How was the week? Thank Goodness it is Friday. I hope all is well. - Jamiel September 29, 2006 @ 9:58am
http://cs.marlboro.edu/ courses/ fall2006/web_design/ wiki/ chat/ first_class
last modified Friday September 29 2006 10:00 am EDT